


Crack Like a Bone

by deathwailart



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Character Study, Child Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-08
Updated: 2012-04-08
Packaged: 2017-11-03 07:31:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/378874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathwailart/pseuds/deathwailart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kara Thrace character study.  Set before New Caprica and before Kara goes back to get Sam.<br/>Title from Like a Prodigal by One Republic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crack Like a Bone

She wears her attitude like she wears her holster, cocked on her hip, folded arms and that smirk that says 'I'm frakking God, pay attention'. Chomping cigars, downing Ambrosia - Starbuck is the big dog, the top dog and she can out fly and outgun anyone else on Galactica any day of the week. And that's how she rolls. Takes the hits with a smirk or a snarky retort, punches her XO in the face, fiercely loyal to the Old Man because he's the only figure in her life that can see more than just the face she puts on for the world. He sees Kara for Kara. Sure, he sees the same cocky pilot and they have their lines when they're on the line or she jogs in step with him in the mornings but she knows he sees more than that.  
  
Took her whole damn life and almost getting a court martial to gain a father figure or some parental figure that isn't going to frak over what she's got left. Because she doesn't have much. None of them do after the Colonies were decimated but what the frak did she have before all that went down? She remembers saying that to Helo, eerie silence outside and her apartment just as she left it and it was sick, suspended in time like that. She'd lost too much before that; her dad, Pyramid, her mother, Zak. She wears her scars on the inside because they never really heal all that well, rubbing raw and bloody on all her broken jagged edges, all her failures and her flaws and her messes that she can't forget. Because Lords' knows she's tried, escaping her problems in the bottom of a bottle like Tigh; the thing you hate the most about someone is the thing you hate most yourself. Sounds like the kind of shit Lee would come out with and he probably has.  
  
Her and Lee are almost opposites. Lee lets his feelings out even though he's the gods damned CAG. Lee tries to frakking relate, tries to soothe her instead of telling her to do her job and get over her damn self the way he should. That's how Kara would do it. That's how she does it. Because the time her feelings got involved she got Zak killed and that haunts her every time a Nugget dies - they're fighting a war but there's that moment of checking that she taught them to the best of her ability and then some, that she only let them out when they were ready.  
  
Starbuck is the one they all know. They don't know Kara. She knows Kara.   
  
Well, when she doesn't start to crack and fracture, Kara bleeding up like stepping on thin ice that shatters; it makes her feel crazy when that happens and she lashes out to cover it up, to keep people from seeing that she's a mess. They don't need to know what x-rays of her hands look like after years of broken fingers. They don't need to know that she swears that she still has a bump somewhere on her head from her mother whacking her with the broom handle. They don't need to know that she cried for a week straight when they said her knee was too badly damaged to let her play Pyramid ever again. The pain from the surgery was nothing compared to the agony of having a dream ripped out from under her, from the way her mother gave her that almost smirk, smug superiority and 'I was right'.  
  
She knows she's got anger issues.  
  
Anger she can cope with, she can swallow it, let it out and she doesn't feel weak because weakness was never allowed in her life. Pain is a constant and it should scare her or sicken her that she'd panic if there wasn't something happening in her life that felt like a fresh bruise, if there wasn't some visceral tearing _thing_. Pain drives her, anger sustains her and somehow it helps hold her up and together. Deep down she knows she's fragile and that one day she's not going to be able to keep the wall she's built up, it's going to come crumbling down brick by brick and she's not ready for that. Back on Caprica was just a taster, the horror of Cylon doctors and women hooked up to machines, so drugged up they couldn't even remember who they were. Or had they just dissociated to cope?   
  
She doesn't want to think about that too closely, not when variations on that theme run through her nightmares mixing with Leoben's words and her mother's lessons. Maybe she'll do what the hotshots do and die (relatively) young and bloody before that happens and she ends up being the one they all look at out the side of their eyes and pity where she stares at her top gun stein the way Socrata stared at that damn medal, drinking and smoking and hating herself into a miserable, lonely death.  
  
All this has happened before, all this will happen again. She'll do it, she'll prove her mother right and worst of all, she'll have wanted it that way too.


End file.
